The Gut Health/Blood Sugar Connection You Need To Know About

Half of the people walking around today have a serious blood sugar problem, and many of them don't even know it. Yes, you read that correctly: 50 percent of adults living in the United States today have diabetes or prediabetes, and even more are suffering from other forms of insulin-resistance-driven blood sugar problems like PCOS and metabolic syndrome.

You likely know that the food you eat on a daily basis directly affects your blood sugar. It's a pretty simple formula: The more sugar you eat, whether it is in the form of carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners, sugar, or fruit, the more likely your blood sugar is to be elevated. When you eat any of these things, your blood sugar spikes, but when these sources make up the majority of your diet, your blood sugar is constantly elevated, and this puts you on the path to diabetes and other metabolic health problems.

The food you eat can affect your blood sugar, but it can also change your microbiome. Interestingly, many of the same foods that spike blood sugar also have been shown to wreck your gut health. For example, artificial sweeteners have been implicated for years in poor microbiome health and bacterial imbalances in the gut.

One of the most recent studies, published in the journal mSphere, looked at the type 2 diabetes drug Acarbose and how it changed animals' microbiome composition to favor bacteria that played a role in controlling blood sugar. Even when those animals ate a higher-starch diet while on this medication, their microbiomes still contained higher levels of the beneficial bacteria Bacteroidaceae and Bifidobacteriaceae and lower levels of the bad bacteria Verruocomicorbiacea and Bacteroidales S24-7. However, once the medication was stopped, these microbiome changes went away as well.

Another study from the Center for Individualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic followed a group of 300 people over the course of six days. The researchers looked at their glycemic responses and found that when taking into account the foods they ate and number of calories they consumed, they could only accurately predict blood sugar between 32 and 40 percent of the time. But when they looked at the specific bacteria in the microbiomes of each individual, they were able to accurately predict blood sugar response 62 percent of the time.

You can also take into consideration the research surrounding the increasingly popular ketogenic diet. One of the biggest health benefits of this high-fat, moderate protein, and low-carb diet is its ability to reduce inflammation, lower insulin levels, and improve insulin receptor site sensitivity. It can be so powerful at controlling blood sugar that it can even reverse symptoms of type 2 diabetes in just 10 weeks! Interestingly, the ketogenic diet has also been shown to change the microbiome in beneficial ways. It's no coincidence that diets high in sugar—the opposite of a ketogenic diet—can contribute to candida overgrowth, which is linked to blood sugar problems and an overgrowth of bad bacteria.